First understand
screenwriter David Sheffield was head writer for "Saturday Night Live" on NBC from 1980 to 1983 – and it seems he got
that job by mailing comedy sketches to the producers in New York while he himself was working at a Biloxi advertising agency
way down in Mississippi. And the AP reports that with his writing partner Barry Blaustein, Sheffield is pretty much
responsible the famous Eddie Murphy characters: “trash-talking Gumby, goofy Buckwheat and James Brown in the hot tub.”

Okay then.

And this man won this year's Faux Faulkner Contest. How? "By imagining what
it would've been like if William Faulkner, a Nobel laureate known for thickets of challenging (often parenthetical) prose,
had written for the Three Stooges."

Cool.

He came up with a 550-word script, "As I Lay Kvetching,"

… which has Moe, Larry and Curly, "slack-jawed and splayfooted," renovating a home, with
the eye-gouging, nose-twisting slapstick guided by plenty of Faulknerian stage directions:

"At last it is Curly
who picks up the plank, rough hewn and smelling of sweet gum, and — feeling the weight and heft and fiber of it —
swings it innocently (bending to retrieve the tool, the ball-peen hammer dropped casually on Larry's toe) and feeling the
awful force of the blow as it (the plank) catches Moe upside his head…."

Hemispheres Magazine also provides, helpfully, texts back through the last fives years of winners.

AP also reports that Faulkner's niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, who has coordinated the parody contest for fifteen years
with her husband, Larry, said Sheffield's script clearly stood out.

"What I cannot believe, from the hundreds and
hundreds of entries we read, is that there could be something this fresh and this new and this funny. This one was unique."

Yep – and this extra AP detail from Emily Wagster Pettus -

Like Sheffield, Faulkner toiled as a Hollywood screenwriter but enjoyed only marginal success
and even less fulfillment in the 1930s, '40s and '50s.

"I think screenwriting is the antithesis of Faulkner," Sheffield
said from his Los Angeles home. "Faulkner is about the joy and profundity of language and words. The best screenwriting is
invisible. The words should disappear into the faces of the actors."

Many of Sheffield's own words have disappeared
into the malleable face of [Eddie] Murphy.

Sheffield lived in Faulkner's native Oxford as a child in the early 1960s,
and he still tries to visit the state a couple of times a year.

Ah Hollywood, and Mississippi….

This calls for a field trip from your intrepid editor. A few blocks east of this desk is Musso and Frank, one
of the oldest restaurants in Hollywood, right in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, with the best martinis in the west, and
the worst service anywhere in North America, from surly waiters in their seventies who look like they came from Central Casting
after the “Cocoon” movies wrapped. In the early forties, when they were both screenwriters in this neighborhood,
it is said Faulkner and Fitzgerald often used to have lunch at Musso and Franks. Legend has it that, after lunch and
many martinis one afternoon, the two of them got to talking about which Hemingway short story just could not be made into
a movie. They settled on “To Have and to Have Not.” Then they wrote the screenplay and the movie got
made. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall – her movie first role. And the two of them got married –
that would be Lauren and Humphrey, not Scott and Bill. Anyway, in homage to Faulkner, lunch and a few martinis at Musso
and Franks might be in order.

After all, Fitzgerald lived on my street, just one block south.

Of course I
won’t bump into Faulkner and Fitzgerald at lunch, but maybe I’ll bump into David Sheffield.And of course I will buy him a drink.He earned it.

___________

Footnote on Musso and Frank

Little has altered since Musso & Frank Grill opened its doors
on Hollywood Boulevard in September of 1919.Office manager Frederica Kaye attributes
it to an old house edict: Put the money in the bank and don't change a thing.Celebrities,
players and Hollywood wannabes still fill the leather booths, counter space and spacious bar, but these days the wait staff—long
considered grumpy by critics and fans alike—seems friendlier. We asked some longtime waiters and bartenders to dish
about that new attitude, among other things.

Gonzalez likes it when Keith Richards and Johnny Depp come in together for lunch, as they often do.They’re big tippers. Aguirre on why the staff had a surly reputation – “They
used to have it in the '40s because the majority was Europeans.”Oh.